The first part of this series covered areas that could have been more frightening in Resident Evil 4, this final segment will elaborate more on what it did well.
Strengths of the game
1. Enemies become progressively more abnormal
Resident Evil 4 begins with Leon searching a Spanish peasant village. Unfortunately, the villagers are hostile to Leon and the first part of the game is a frenzied battle against the entire town. However, they still appear human. The only thing that's odd at this point is that they take an alarming number of bullets from your pistol to kill, coming back at you after being shot several times in the head.
A typical welcoming committee for government agents in the village of Pueblo
As you progress through the village area, you run into a much stronger enemy, a guy with a sack on his head and a huge chainsaw. He takes a remarkable amount of ammunition to put down and the concealment of his humanity with the sack over his face makes him more intimidating than the rest of the villagers.
The village theater must have had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre screening the day before Leon showed up.
After night falls the village becomes truly terrifying. The villagers are harder to see and now some of them turn into much more powerful enemies when killed. Their head explodes and in its place comes a twirling blade tentacle that can quickly kill Leon in a few hits.
On the positive side, the blade tentacle does actually improve this woman's appearance.
Later in the game different things spawn out of their heads, such as this thing that can lunge forward and chomp Leon's head off in one gulp.
What the hell!Headshots were previously the most effective way to kill the villagers. Now they become risky as that makes it more likely that these dangerous tentacles are going to come out of their corpse.
An enemy that arrives much later in the game, called a regenerator, is one of the creepiest I have seen in any game.
This picture doesn't do it justice.
If you shoot it, you blow parts of its body off, but that only delays it for a few seconds as it regrows that part. If you blow a leg off, it will flop toward you on the ground like a fish. It can then leap up at Leon from the ground and start biting his face off.
Ouch!
The game does a great job of keeping the enemies from becoming stale, every time you think you know what you'll be facing their appearance is changed, they gain a new ability, or become less human. This keeps the player uncertain about his opposition, keeping the atmosphere frightening.
Sound Effects
One of the highlights of the game is the quality of its sound effects. All of Leon's various firearms make satisfying retorts when fired. Human enemies scream pitifully when shot in the head or leg.
An unusual squishy sound is made when their head gets blown off as well.
However the highlight for me are the calls of the humanoid enemies. Whenever one of the villagers spots Leon they point dramatically at him and call their buddies for help. This usually comes out of complete silence beforehand as well, making it a dramatic moment.
One of the later groups of enemies is a bunch of monks. They chant throughout the entire time they're trying to kill Leon, a sinister background noise to combat. When they are ready to attack with their scythes, flails, or other weapons they will yell something right in Leon's ear. When they manage to sneak up behind you this is quite terrifying, as you know you're going to get hit by something painful.
They also need to get outside of the castle a bit more often.
The regenerator is a star performer in this category. It has a weird wet raspy breath that it makes as it shuffles toward you. When you shoot it, it grunts strangely. It's limbs explode wetly when shot off. The flopping sound it makes as it hops toward you along the ground if you blow off one of its legs is just like a wet fish.
Any horror games needs to put a lot of effort into its sound effects if it wants to fully involve the player. Vision and hearing are the two main senses stimulated by games, you can't afford to neglect one of them.
Player Deaths
One important aspect of a survival-horror game is that there should be a fear of death. If the player does not have to worry about being killed, a great deal of tension is lost. There are many horrific ways Leon Kennedy can die in Resident Evil 4. He can be blown up by dynamite, be disemboweled by a peasant with a pitchfork, get hit by crossbow bolts that are lit on fire, get crushed by a rolling boulder, and many other options.
My personal favorite is head lopped off by chainsaw.
It's important that a horror game show the player character dying. If this part is skipped over then the reality of failure isn't shown to the player. It also makes the enemies less frightening if their ability to cut off your character's head isn't displayed.
Solve a puzzle? Something bad is probably going to happen.
Solving a puzzle is one of the riskiest actions you can take in Resident Evil 4. Virtually every time, it will cause a boss battle against some terrifying enemy, a horde of villagers to come howling at you, or other bad things to happen. The same is true for entering any area that was initially devoid of enemies. If nothing hostile is immediately visible, it's safe to bet that won't last much longer. Any horror game that manages to make the player dread progressing through it is doing a great job.
Background Details
A final important touch that some games neglect is to make sure that the scenery you're moving through is suitable to the game's atmosphere. In Silent Hill 2, the game takes place with an eerie fog throughout the entire town, which blocks off most of the player's vision. This was actually a mechanism to allow the game to work with the PS2's graphical capabilities, but in does double duty by also helping to terrify the player. Enemies are present in this fog and may come at the main character with little to no warning. It's difficult to prepare for a foe that you can't see at range.
Although you can at least have a big stick ready to hit something with.
It's also important to have additional details that reflect what happened to the victims of the tragedy before the player showed up. For instance, if most of a town was murdered there needs to be corpses, blood smears, and other such evidence present.
Bodies stuck on sticks are popular as well.
If, like most horror plots, some sort of medical experiments were being done, have some evidence of the victims around.
Here the scientists were trying to discover what happens when you stick sharp spider legs through someone's back.
Conclusion
Fear is one of the emotions that is hardest to evoke in videogames. This is principally because all the details have to be correct for it to work. If the game is too well lit, if the enemies look silly, if the sound effects are poorly done, any little thing being badly done can ruin the effect. The most important part of a successful horror game is to get these elements done right. Otherwise it's just a joke.
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